The website has been assembled with several uses in mind. It began as a place to provide illustrations of the multi-resolution National Elevation Dataset (NED) and the Elevation Derivatives for National Applications (EDNA) to a selected audience through the Internet. NED and EDNA are national database development efforts intended to be broadly useful for geographic analysis applications at the national, regional, and local scales. After September 11th, 2001, Lincoln was identified as one of the 120 cities holding 80% of the U.S. population, and the website became a place to build illustrations of the utility of spatial data in understanding and managing homeland security risks.